Siegfried and Roy

Today is the birthday of Siegfried Fischbacher (b. 1939). Together with his partner Roy Horn (b. 1944) he was half of the prototypical large scale Las Vegas stage act Siegfried and Roy starting in the early 1970s. Siegfried is a magician; Horn worked with big cats, usually white lions and tigers.

Even the most politically correct of people used to snigger about Siegfried and Roy — not because they were gay, but because they were gay German lion tamers with a sense of style that ranked with Liberace’s for grandmotherly tackiness. The jokes stopped coming when Roy got his head bitten by one of the big cats in 2003 during a live performance. Most people who aren’t monsters have been rooting for him ever since. Roy spent several years attempting to recover; the team officially retired in 2010.

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Published by travsd

Writer and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com) has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. He has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, which has presented hundreds of top variety acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Lady Rizo to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces in NYC since 1989 at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre and the Brick. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit I’ll Say She Is, the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival. He is perhaps best known for his 2005 book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, recently cited by Bette Midler in People magazine as one of her favorite book. More about All Things Trav S.D. are at: http://travsd.com/
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3 comments

But that’s sort of an issue in the wild, isn’t it, with the groinal poaching done against tigers – cats believe that once you ‘fix’ them, they become homosexual. I know mine started doing hair and having his legs shaved within months of his package sugary, uh, surgery.